EDUCATION IN RISK MANAGEMENT AT GRMI: BY AMBICA GULATI

Businesses across the world are in the phase of rapid growth, integration and globalisation. To continue to grow at a rapid pace, business requires taking risks. Businesses that manage these risks well are able to grow and remain successful. On an ongoing basis, businesses have to deal with the changing risk landscape including market volatility, geopolitical crises, wide-spread economic changes, regulatory reforms and cyber threats. While this creates many challenges, it also presents an opportunity to take advantage of the potential of risk.

Today, successful organisations are those which are able to manage the risks effectively. Risk Management is beyond financial and regulatory risk mitigation, it looks at the overall business environment, and encompasses managing strategic, operational, regulatory, compliance and financial risk of an organisation.

Which industries are more prone to risks?

Risk Management is required across all industries–manufacturing, retail, telecommunication, hospitality, service. Risk Management also cuts across all business functions in an organisation like procurement, HR payroll, sales and marketing, manufacturing, treasury and thus is beyond just financial and regulatory risk mitigation. Risk Management team plays a critical role in all organisations, and feed key business information to the management teams, to enable them in taking risk informed strategic decisions, which carves the path of success.

Where do you get your faculty from?

As Global Risk Management Institute ‘GRMI’ is the pioneer in starting a full blown programme on end to end Risk Management, faculty for this course was difficult to identify. We have created an enviable mix of academicians from some of the best B schools and extremely successful corporate leaders. We understand the importance of having the right faculty, and thus we have also got international faculty from New York, to come and teach some specific papers to our students. They are committed to building world class leaders and risk averters who will be all-rounded professionals and not mere risk domain experts. The key faculty members constitute of Professor Madhu Vij, faculty in Finance from FMS, Delhi University, Dr. Sonali Hazarika, faculty in Finance from Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York, P K Mukherjee, who is a fellow member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Chetan Mathur, CA, Faculty of Management Studies, Professor MC Kapoor as faculty for Marketing and others.

Risk management as a concept and service in the Indian corporate world is growing at a rapid pace. With globalisation being the norm for rapid growth, risk management has gained significant importance in the corporate world in India and globally now. Risk Consulting firms are clocking higher end double digit growth, and Industry players are beefing up their Risk Management practices in-house to ensure they have strong risk management frameworks.

However, if you look the education in Risk Management space, India is almost at par with the globe, as there is no full blown programme on end to end Risk Management. There exist institutes which cover small modules on Risk Management like Credit Risk Management, Insurance Risk, Financial Risk. In that sense, GRMI and India will be the pioneer by launching this curriculum.

What is the industry’s take on this course and how supportive is it for recruitments?

Talking about the current scenario, a lot of time is being spent by companies to train risk management concepts to the resources hired – leading to lower productivity for the organisation in the initial phase of employee career. Thus, a talent pool of professionals trained on a world class Risk Management curriculum will lead to higher productivity for all– small, medium and large corporates. Leading consulting firms and industry players have shown keen interest in hiring an all round specialist from GRMI in their organisation as that will help them gain substantial productivity and efficiency from Day 1. Some of the large consulting and risk consulting organisations such as Accenture, EY, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Protiviti, Grant Thornton, etc. and other large corporate organizations like General Electric (GE), Tata Group, PepsiCo. will now get an opportunity to induct trained students in their organisations at a much earlier stage.